Advocatus Diaboli writes: Some of the most prominent parts of the social media site Reddit are going dark in defiance of the removal of an admin who organized the site’s popular “IAmA” interviews with celebrities, politicians, and other people of note. The subreddit/r/IAmA was the first to go dark following the departure of administrator Victoria Taylor, a Reddit employee who was let go, according to the forum moderators. Taylor scheduled and ran many of the forum’s Q&As.

schwit1 writes: The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham familyâ(TM)s stewardship of one of Americaâ(TM)s leading news organizations after four generations.

Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the worldâ(TM)s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.

Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days. The Post Co. will change to a new, still-undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without The Post thereafter.

You probably remember the online outrage over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) copyright enforcement proposal. Last week, the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force released a report on digital copyright policy that endorsed one piece of the controversial proposal: making the streaming of copyrighted works a felony.

As it stands now, streaming a copyrighted work over the Internet is considered a violation of the public performance right. The violation is only punishable as a misdemeanor, rather than the felony charges that accompany the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material.

beltsbear writes: Following a reasonable view of drug patents, the Indian courts have decided that making small changes to an existing patented drug are not worthy of a new patent. This ruling makes way for low cost Indian cancer drugs that will save lives.From the Article:"Novartis lost a six-year legal battle after the court ruled that small changes and improvements to the drug Glivec did not amount to innovation deserving of a patent. The ruling opens the way for generic companies in India to manufacture and sell cheap copies of the drug in the developing world and has implications for HIV and other modern drugs too."

Calidreth writes: Nintendo has definitely been in a lot of news headlines as of late. From Iwata slashing his salary in half to the 3DS dropping to 170 dollars, a lot of the focus has been on the poor sales of the 3DS. Nintendo is hoping to get sales rolling again with the help of their holiday lineup and a brand new color for their newest handheld. On September 9, Nintendo will roll out the “Flame Red” 3DS, which conveniently debuts the same day as Star Fox 64 3D. Nintendo is hoping that these new releases will put them back in the driver’s seat this holiday season.

aesoteric writes: An anonymous activist claimed to be downloading copyright material through a 'Government ISP' less than an hour after an anti filesharing law came into effect in New Zealand. The law, passed in April, held internet account holders liable for infringement instead of the filesharers themselves. The activist was apparently testing whether they could get the New Zealand Government fined by their own law.

oxide7 writes: After a nearly three year journey, NASA's Mars rover "Opportunity" has reached its destination at a edge of a crater-rim, sending back photographs of never seen before rocks. "We're soon going to get the opportunity to sample a rock type the rovers haven't seen yet," said Matthew Golombek, Mars Exploration Rover science team member, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "Clay minerals form in wet conditions so we may learn about a potentially habitable environment that appears to have been very different from those responsible for the rocks comprising the plains."

Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @07:39AM

An anonymous reader writes: It now appears that the malaria mosquito needs more than one family of odor sensors to sniff out its human prey. That is the implication of new research into the mosquito's sense of smell published in the Aug. 31 issue of the online, open-access journal Public Library of Science Biology. The experiments described in the paper provide striking new evidence that Anopheles gambiae – the species of mosquito that spreads malaria that infects some 250 million and kills 900,000 people annually – has a second set of olfactory sensors that are fundamentally different from the set of sensors that scientists have known about and have been studying for the last 10 years.

Submitted
by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @06:42AM

An anonymous reader writes: Despite typically being completely insecure, web servers on printers/scanners are generally of little interest from a security perspective, even though they may be accessible over the web, due to network misconfigurations. HP has for some time, embedded remote scanning capabilities into many of their network aware scanners, a functionality often referred to as Webscan. Webscan allows you to not only remotely trigger the scanning functionality, but also retrieve the scanned image, all via a web browser. To make things even more interesting, the feature is generally turned on by default with absolutely no security whatsoever.

Submitted
by
bossanovalithium
on Wednesday September 01, 2010 @06:01AM

bossanovalithium writes: Rice University scientists have created two terminal memory that uses only Silicon. The new technology places multiple layers of memory capacity on the same chip, creating a 3-D memory architecture. The new technology could withstand radiation and temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius that would cause solid-state disk memory to disintegrate.

They claim that the discovery will extend the limits of miniaturisation subject to Moore's Law.